Ellipsis in textarea with fixed height

Targets iOS
1

Hi everyone,

I am working on an iOS mobile app using a MobileTable with a custom cell container. Inside each row, I have an editable TextArea used for a task description.

Because this description is inside a tight, repeating list row, I need to keep the row footprint relatively compact. However, I am hitting a couple of major walls:

  1. The Row-Height Bloat Issue: I tried setting AllowDynamicHeight = True on the custom cell to let the text expand naturally. However, when the TextArea contains multi-line text or carriage returns, it forces the custom row to calculate extra blank space, creating a massive, empty gap of whitespace underneath the text before the next task entry appears.
  2. The Layout Requirements: Setting ReadOnly = True or using a standard Label is not an option for my layout—the user must be able to interact with or edit the text.

What I am trying to achieve:
I want the TextArea to stay at a small, fixed height inside the list row so the table remains clean and perfectly aligned. If the database description overflows that fixed space or has a line break, I want to temporarily clip the string or find out where it naturally wraps so I can insert a visual ellipsis (... 📄) or an indicator to signal to the user: “There is more text here, tap this row to open a full screen to view/edit it.”

Since we can’t reliably use a dummy Picture.Graphics.TextWidth loop on iOS due to native margins and dynamic text scaling, how are people handling text overflow indicators inside editable mobile text fields? Is there a clean way to detect line breaks or a native iOS declare that can tell me if a TextArea is currently overflowing its visible frame?

Any examples or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

Just a side thought - but if you specify a fixed-width font, you could calculate your required dimensions for a specific character count.

3

Disclaimer: I am not an iOS programmer.

See if that helps; it’s for Swift: Text with ellipses

All operating systems have functions to ellipse text: you provide the text and the width, and they return the text ellipsed!

My guess is that with declares, you may achieve your goal.

HTH

4

unfortunately I don’t think that will work for a textarea field ;(

5

I’d considered that but fixed font doesn’t look too nice in my app.

Thanks

Sharon

6

I ended up putting a label on top with the same text that truncated the end and making it the same size as the textarea. Had to shift a bit to get the padding lined up, but works good